by Ed Lin
They gave me the option to defer enrollment at the academy, but I said I wanted to go now.
—
After forever, the Kiwanis dinner was over. I stood under a tin awning on Mulberry Street. It was about 28 degrees outside, but the heat had been on full blast inside. My sweat was still leaking out and I could feel loose Tic Tacs melting in my damp pants pocket, making my thigh tingle.
I used to keep a small tube of toothpaste in my pocket to squeeze into my mouth and cover up my breath. Then I had trouble finding the travel size, and when I did, it was almost the same price as the regular, so I said to hell with it. I wasn’t going to pay the same price for something less. That was against the laws of economics and, therefore, against Chinese culture.
Now I keep some loose Tic Tacs in my right front pocket with the keys. I don’t like the sound of them rattling around in the little plastic box. When I’m running low, I lick my finger and run it around the inside of my pocket to pick up the pieces.
“The cold doesn’t stop the mailman, why should you people be any different?”
I looked down at the midget. He was smoking.
“Mailmen take breaks, too,” I said.
“Who has a more important job, a mailman or policeman?”
“In Chinatown? People love the postman. Could be bringing a package from Hong Kong. Could be bringing a sweepstakes winner. When they see a policeman, he’s only bringing trouble.”
“Everybody doesn’t think that way.”
“You tell me who doesn’t. I can tell just by the way they look at me.”
“You get used to the way people look at you,” said the midget. He tossed his cigarette into the street. “You can learn how to use it.”
—
I went into a drugstore on Henry Street off of Catherine. I had been on my way back to my apartment, but I was out of toilet paper and using the cheap napkins I had piled up from over-rice joints was the stuff that nightmares are made of.
It was a small store, probably only 12 by 12. The floor was half worn-out carpet and half tile where the carpet had been torn out. Most of the floor was covered up by dented wire shelves filled mostly with hammers, plungers, and other light hardware. The guy who ran the store never said much and sat slumped against the counter, seemingly oblivious to the transistor radio chittering from somewhere unseen under the counter.
I only went there to buy toilet paper because it was the cheapest place in Chinatown for it. I picked up a four-pack of Charmin and brought it up front.
“I don’t have any shopping bags left,” the slumping man said.
“So that means I get a discount, right?” I said.
He frowned. It was the most expressive I’d ever seen him.
“You don’t think my prices are cheap enough?”
“Hey, come on now, I was only kidding.” His face resumed its stony look when I took my money out and paid him.
I walked out of the store with the toilet paper shoved under my left arm. It didn’t stick out much, but I managed to ram it into the chest of a woman walking towards me.
“I’m so sorry — Barbara.”
“Robert! Nice to see that you’re taking care of yourself.”
“I certainly am.”
“Hey, where did you go after the Girl Scouts thing? How could you walk out on me?”
“I guess I could ask you the same question, regarding a
certain dance.”
She pushed her lips up into her nose. It was an ugly thing
to watch.
“That was 10 years ago,” she said. “More than 10 years ago!”
“You take a girl out, you think you have some sort of bond with her. I’m not saying boyfriend-girlfriend thing, but, you know, something.”
“Oh, Robert, I was so much higher on life back then.”
I looked over her left shoulder.
“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked.
“Yeah. You can.”
We went over two blocks to Wilson’s on Oliver Street, a dark and quiet place. It was no place for a date, but if the cigarette fumes were fading from your clothes and hair, the bar was a great place to get a touchup. We slid into a booth and got two Michelobs on tap.
“Why the hell are you back in Chinatown?” I asked her.
“A lot of reasons.”
“Let’s go through them.”
“For one, I work here now.”
“In Chinatown?”
“In New York. Midtown East.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a low-level associate for the American Trade Council for U.S.-China.”
“What the hell is that?”
“What we are, really, are consultants who specialize in business and political connections between the U.S. and Taiwan.”
“I thought you said it was the council for China.”
“Yes, Taiwan as in the ‘Republic of China.’ America doesn’t have official trade links with mainland China.”
“How is business?”
“Not good, and getting worse.”
“Why’s that?”
“Basically the fact is that sooner or later, probably sooner, the U.S. is going to switch allegiance and recognize the mainland instead of Taiwan.”
“If they are going to fucking recognize a communist country, then why the hell did they send us over to Nam?”
“What happened in Vietnam is a part of what is going to lead to the decision on Taiwan. If we had been able to wipe out North Vietnam, then there’s no way we’d even think of abandoning Taiwan. We’d probably be helping them launch an attack on the mainland.”
She looked calm, professional, and even a little bored.
My beer was already gone and I had nothing to cool down the anger that was building in my chest.
“Must be nice to just sit back on your cushy Harvard ass and write about whatever pops into your head.”
“Robert. . . “
“I was there, Barbara! They sent us into hell and wanted to forget us when we couldn’t win!”
“I know how you feel.”
“You don’t know how I fucking feel! You have no idea!”
“My husband served in Vietnam.”
“Drafted?”
“Enlisted. Finished one tour and then re-enlisted.”
“When did you get married?”
“Senior year.”
“That’s early.”
“If it feels right, you do it. I’m the oldest of four. I get older at a faster rate, too.”
“Do you feel like your husband cares about you?” It was a hard question for me to ask.
“He doesn’t care about anybody anymore.”
“Two tours of Vietnam will do that to you.”
“He’s dead. He was killed in Khe Sanh.”
“I’m sorry, Barbara.”
“It was years ago. I thought I could just stay in Boston and move on with my life. But in reality, I was falling apart. My parents were going back to Hong Kong, so I figured I’d move back into the apartment.”
“Is everything working out OK?”
“I used to know everybody. Now I feel almost like a stranger here. Everyone you knew back then, are they still around?”
“They’re all gone for the most part,” I said. “I’m pretty far gone, too.”
“I knew you when you were a kid.”
“Well, I knew you, too.”
I had another full pint in front of me. At some point, refills had come to our table without us noticing.
“I didn’t graduate from Harvard, Robert.”
“You didn’t finish school?”
“No, I went to college, but my certificate says I went to Radcliffe. Harvard is the degree men receive.”
She looked at me and gave her glass a half turn.
“You know, Robert,” Barbara said. “The girls used to call you ‘Cracker Jack.’” She smiled for the first time in a while.
“How come?”
“You used to be so, I
don’t know, pro-America and anti-Communist. You wouldn’t shut up about it. So we said
you were like that sailor on the Cracker Jack box with his perpetual salute.”
“God, I think was.”
“What was I like?”
“You don’t remember? You were like Miss Chinatown.”
“It seems like somebody else.”
I was halfway done with my drink.
“Barbara, I used to think we could’ve been something.”
“We were something, Robert.”
My glass was empty now.
“I took you to that Chinese New Year dance and I kissed you,” I told her. “Then you kinda avoided me for a while. You went to Stuy in tenth grade and we never said much to each other after.”
Stuyvesant was one of the city’s special schools for gifted children. You had to take tests to get in. I wouldn’t have even qualified to mop the floors there.
“Robert, I studied my brains out. Right through college.”
“I thought everything came to you naturally.”
“No, way! I was always reading. In fact, I had to stop taking classes the summer before sophomore year in college.”
“Most people stop taking classes in the summer.”
“I was trying to get a double major done. Economics and English. You know, one degree for my parents and one for me. So one day, I started hearing voices. I had some therapy sessions. The funny thing was they were paying me because it was an experiment.”
“They gave you LSD?”
“No! It was all about talking. I talked everything out and they listened.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Believe it or not, I talked about you a little bit.”
She gave me a knowing look that made my leg twitch.
“Aw, bullshit.”
“No, I swear, I still have the transcript!”
“Is it in your apartment?”
“It’s in a box in the kitchen. You wanna see it?”
“Sounds like a good-enough excuse,” I said.
I swung my arms back and stuck them into the sleeves of my coat. We slid out of the booth.
—
I had never been to Barbara’s house. Back when I had taken her to the dance, I had met her at the pinball parlor on Pell that’s a dumpling joint now. Like most Chinese parents, Barbara’s mom and dad hadn’t liked the idea of her dating before college.
We went into the vestibule of her apartment on Madison. The outer door was missing, and the inner metal-plated door looked like the hood of a Datsun after UAW workers had gotten to it with sledgehammers. I looked down at the floor as Barbara fumbled with her keys. The ceramic tiles were wet and dirty.
“This goddamn lock,” Barbara muttered.
“Lemme see,” I said. I shifted the pack of toilet paper to my left arm and took over. I rattled her key the way I rattled mine and the cylinder turned. “I win.”
“That’s nothing. I’ll race you upstairs,” she said.
“No.”
The apartment was on the third floor, behind a door that was mummified with opaque cellophane tape and bits of red paper from 30 years of Chinese holiday decorations. Down the hall, past two tricycles, Neil Young was singing “Cinnamon Girl.”
Barbara got her door open and I followed her in. We were immediately in the kitchen.
“This apartment’s laid out really funny,” she said. “A long time ago, they knocked down a few walls and put up another.”
She turned on the bare light bulb in the kitchen and it lit up the entire apartment.
“How the hell,” I started, “did all of you fit in here?” There was a kitchen, a living room, and a closet bathroom.
“We had cots set up in the kitchen and living room. All of us never slept at the same time. Our parents slept during the day.” She fumbled around with a kitchen drawer. “Drink red wine?”
“Yeah.”
She got on her toes to reach for a bottle on top of the refrigerator. Her short sleeve fell away to show the hump of a muscular shoulder.
“How’d you get that?” I asked. “You’re like a marine.”
“I keep a five-pound barbell in my desk at work. A couple of reps a day helps me deal with stress.”
She got us two coffee mugs and poured wine to the brim, which was risky because both of them had chipped rims.
“Hey, watch it!” I said. “Don’t spill any!”
“Well, don’t dribble!”
I quickly drank my mug down an inch.
“I had thought that out of everybody down here, you would never come back, Barbara.”
“Why?”
“You’re beautiful. And you’re smart.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, Robert?”
“It doesn’t mean anything here.”
“I didn’t plan on coming back, not this way, anyway. Goes to show, you never know what life will deal you.” She leaned forward on her elbows and put her face up to mine. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“Did you want to see me again?”
“I don’t know, but it’s so good to see you. Really, it is.” Some pink was getting into her eyes. It was either the drink or she was about to cry.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I drank. A trickle of wine slipped through a chip and traced down my neck. She put her fingers on the back of my neck and rubbed her thumb slowly against my throat. It felt tingly, slippery.
“Don’t rub the lamp if you don’t want the genie to come out,” I said.
“I get three wishes, don’t I?”
I gently nudged the table and drinks aside. Then I pulled Barbara into my lap.
Chapter 6
I propped myself up against the headboard, which was the back of the foldout sofa. My head was hurting. There wasn’t much light coming in, but it was about eight.
Tomorrow was Chinese New Year.
I slid out naked and staggered to the refrigerator. I found a bottle of Bud on its side under the crisper. I came back to the bed and sat on the edge. I picked at the cap with the tine on my belt buckle. I finally worked it off, but the bottle cap landed in Barbara’s hair.
She moaned, then brushed her ear. I took the cap away with my free hand.
“Robert, are you drinking?”
“Yeah, got a beer out of the fridge.”
“Argh, I was saving that for cooking.” After a few minutes, she asked, “Do you always drink in the morning?”
“Only when I’m up before noon.”
I took a few deep swigs.
“Hey, that was really nice last night,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I finished the bottle and put it on the coffee table.
“What are we doing? We’re crazy!”
“This is not the first time for either of us.”
“But this is the first time. For us!”
“Let’s celebrate with breakfast.”
“I’m so hungry.” She pushed half her face into the pillow. “And there’s nothing to eat here.”
“How about some pastries?”
“Yeah, let’s go to Martha’s!”
“Oh, whoa, no, not Martha’s!”
“It’s the best bakery in Chinatown!”
“It gets too crowded in there.”
“It’s crowded because it’s good and it’s on the way to the train.”
“That woman there gives me the evil eye, you know,
the one who looks like she shovels gravel?”
“It takes a tough woman to make a tender pastry. C’mon, let’s get moving!”
—
When we came in, the morning rush was already over and Lonnie was by herself behind the counter. Dori was sitting in a corner, smoking a cigarette and reading the Hong Kong newspaper. They both stared at us. I became very conscious of the fact that we looked disheveled, more than usual for me.
Three teenage degenerates hugged the walls in the corner. The one with the spiky hair smiled at me and picke
d his teeth.
“Looks like the cop finally saw some action last night,” he said out loud to his friends. I wanted to put a bullet in his head, but he wasn’t worth the paperwork I’d have to do after.
Dori smirked. Lonnie put on a very serious look.
“How are you today, Officer Chow?” she asked.
“I’m doing well, thank you.”
Lonnie gave me an expectant look.
“Oh, Barbara, this is Lonnie. Uh, she works here.”
Barbara smiled and said, “Hi.”
“More hot-dog buns today?” asked Lonnie.
“You eat those, Robert?” asked Barbara incredulously. “It’s kid food!”
“Sometimes I feel like a kid,” I said.
“Every day,” said Lonnie.
“That’s a lot of calories!”
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “I mean, I walk it all off.”
“I think I’m just going to have a plain bun and a hot coffee,” said Barbara.
“And you?” Lonnie asked me.
“Just an iced coffee.”
Lonnie turned and put the plain bun into a paper bag.
“Can you put that on a tray, Lonnie? We’re going to eat here.”
“Actually, Robert,” Barbara said, “I’m going to get that to go. I have to go back and do some work. But you stay with your friends here.”
“I, uh, sure. OK.”
She grabbed her stuff and left without even waving. I was dimly aware of getting my iced coffee from Lonnie. I leaned against the counter and drove a straw into the lid.
“Is she your girlfriend?” Lonnie asked.
“Oh no, no, no. She’s an old friend. We grew up together.”
Dori spoke up.
“That woman, she could do a lot better than a policeman. She doesn’t even want to be seen in public with you,
Officer Chow.”
“She just likes her privacy, like me.”
Lonnie cleared her throat.
“So, you don’t have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“I’m not really the type to have a girlfriend,” I said.
“Lonnie!” shouted Dori. “You have to clean off the counter!”
“It’s already clean.”
“Clean the part Officer Chow is on when he leaves. He probably got it greasy.”
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Bye, Officer Chow,” Lonnie said.
If I had stayed, I might have left a bigger mess for Lonnie to clean up. I glanced at those punk kids but they were completely ignoring me.